Su Job, 1956-2008

Best known for a soft-porn needlepoint project but also renowned for painted silks that she sold internationally, Su Job, 52, died in the early evening of Dec. 25. By the time her cancer had been diagnosed on Nov. 3, it was terminal.

From Molly Norris, who complied a list of comments from Su Job’s friends for Art Access:

Gael Zane

In the late ’90s, I worked for Su making purses. I was new in town, and sort of blue and lonesome. One time as I was cutting vinyl I heard the voices of Su and Dave Crow singing Happy Birthday and when I looked up from the cutting table they were standing there with a candle-lit muffin – both stark naked. She had THE best New Year’s Eve parties ever. I remember one which will never be beat. She’d found all these gigantic mirrors and lined the studio hall with them. Every bathroom and elevator was filled with people making out. Okay, having sex. It was great.

Amontaine Aurore Woods

I have admired so many things about her. Like her hands, the fingernails stained black with her labors of love, and from which come glorious hand-painted silk scarves. Hands now whipping up carrot soup, now fashioning holiday stockings for the kids at the TK, sewing tangled threads of eroticism into blocks of soft fiber, baking perfectly round Bundt cakes for those she loves. I have coveted her mind, a mind at once intimidating and fascinating, slicing through facets of postmodern art, geopolitical warfare and economic theory like a ginsu knife through a hard McIntosh apple. I have been caught off guard by how skillfully and without fanfare she is both sexy and smart, always causing me to say
to myself, “Yes, a woman can be all!”

Tony Dattilo

She was walking up the street and as usual I startled her because she didn’t notice me until I was right in front of her. I said, “Geez Su you were really out there, what were you thinking about?” She replied, ” My doctoral thesis and the implications of quantum mechanics on the arts.” I said, “Oh cool. What school are you getting to write about that at? ” She replied, “Oh … nowhere yet.”

Cathryn Vandenbrink

Su is always organizing something for the children at Tashiro Kaplan — Halloween parties, holiday decorating parties or just time to mess around in her studio. Visitors to her loft are immediately connected to her great sense of color and big big creative life.

Lynn Schirmer

With seemingly inexhaustible energy she runs her life, managing floors of studios at 619 Western, teaching at several colleges, growing her silk clothing business, participating in community development, and making art. It’s not uncommon that after a full week of work, she will throw a party providing a huge spread of food and drink, usually in honor of an artist friend’s opening, or birthday. She plays a central role in guiding and binding together the community here at the Tashiro Kaplan building. There are children in the building who count on her advice. We’ve spent long evenings talking about art, men, our families, our respective jobs, neighborhood politics, and of course sharing a bit of building gossip. Su has supported me at every art show I’ve had since we met. I also had the pleasure of exhibiting her work in my gallery, Corridor, at the TK. I cannot imagine life without her, my dear friend. I’ve admired her courage all along, but did not know its depth until this last test.

At a silent auction on her behalf Dec. 13, her brother Jeff Job looked around the packed auditorium and thought of the movie “Mr. Holland’s Opus.”

“I told her that those people at the auction were her opus, all the lives she touched.”
Intended to help cover the cost of late-stage home care, the auction raised $30,000, he said. What’s left of the money will be donated to a fund set up in Job’s honor to be administered by Artist Trust and 4Culture.

“Her final wish was that the grant, to be called the Conductive Garboil Grant, be awarded to artists who had some relationship to Pioneer Square,” said her executor and friend Lynn Schirmer.

Steven Miller said he was “blown away by how fiercely Su looked death in the eye. She told me it sucked that she didn’t have more time and said she wished she had worked harder. That’s what I’m taking away from this. Life is short. Time to stop slacking.”

Job was born in Michigan Jan. 19, 1956, and moved around the Midwest as a child. Her brother Jeff remembers her as rebellious.

“She never played it safe,” he said. “When she was a teenager, she felt she should be able to do whatever she wanted. That never changed. She was a bold woman. I remember talking to her one morning on the phone, and she told me a list of things she’d done and asked me what I’d done that day. I said, ‘I got up and ate a bowl of cereal.”

Her brother was with her when she was diagnosed.

“I was in shock, but within 20 minutes she was clear about what she wanted,” he said. “First thing, she didn’t want to die in a hospital. She thought hospitals were scary and stale. She died where she wanted to be. Out her window she could see Pioneer Square. She was surrounded by her books, with KPLU playing softly in the background.

“The second thing was, she didn’t want to be in pain,” he said. “She was glad the assisted suicide bill passed, because she didn’t intend to stick around in misery when there was no hope of recovery. She didn’t want a funeral, but she thought a party would be nice. She made it abundantly clear she wanted her friends to celebrate, not to mourn her.”

Job received a bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of Tennessee in 1986 and a master of fine arts degree from the University of Washington in 1989. For more than 20 years she was a force in Pioneer Square, working to secure artist housing and offering encouragement to artists in their studios and congratulations at their exhibit openings.

She taught art and art history at Cornish College, the Seattle Art Institute and Gage Academy. Her silk clothing business, Fiber At Large, sold her one-of-a-kind silk scarves nationwide. Her fiber sculpture was last exhibited at Portland’s Museum of Contemporary Craft.

“She gave up driving a few years ago because she thought it was too expensive, but she bought a little scooter she just loved,” Jeff Job said. “One time I was driving home in West Seattle and I saw a woman in an orange helmet with red hair flopping out the sides in front of me. Had to be her. I pulled alongside, and she was smiling away with the wind in her face.”

“She was a warrior,” he said. “Anytime there was a problem, she’d organize folks. She was good at clarifying things and good at dialogue. If there’s any good thing to come out of her early death, it’s if more people realize they need to take advantage of their time they have and be helpful to each other, as she was.”

Job is survived by survived by her mother, Betty Job of Jacksonville, Fla.; her sister, Diane Staley in Bozman, Md.; and brothers Chris Job in Indianapolis and Jeff in Seattle.

Memorial contributions to the Conductive Garboil Grant can be sent to Artist Trust.